How a Workflow Solution Grew Traffic by 1,164% in 3 Months
https://www.process.st/
Stats
76.72K to 969.6K Monthly Visits
Industry
SaaS
Niche
Process Management
Reporting Date
December 2023
The Software as a Service (SaaS) market is set to hit USD 908.21 billion by 2030.
With a booming digital landscape, companies are making big moves to get noticed in this growing domain.
In this SEO case study, we'll explore how one process management platform took a creative approach to stand out in search results.
Meet Process Street, a SaaS solution set to break 1 million monthly visits.
Join us as we reveal the strategies behind their success and share tips for replicating their growth on your website.
In This Article
About Process Street
Process Street is a leading process management tool for teams. It leverages the power of AI to streamline workflows for greater operational efficiency.
With its user-friendly interface, teams can easily create, manage, and execute complex workflows.
It also helps teams improve essential tasks like document creation and data management.
Process Street offers collaborative features tailored for teams of all sizes.
Overall, its scalability and flexibility make it an invaluable tool for organizations seeking to boost productivity.
Historical Performance
Process Street was founded in 2014.
Semrush historical data reveals that traffic stayed below 30K monthly visits for the first 3 years.
They experienced an impressive growth phase from 2019 to 2021. This coincides with the COVID pandemic when many organizations were adopting cloud-based solutions.
Unfortunately, traffic fell shortly thereafter.
Traffic-wise, 2022 was a challenging year. However, Process Street experienced unprecedented growth in 2023.
September 2023 marks the beginning of growth, with monthly traffic jumping from 76.7K to 255K in October.
Traffic doubled the following month, with Process Street reaching over half a million visits in November.
And now, as we look at their explosive growth in December, Process Street is just shy of 1 million visits.
So, how did they do it?
And what strategies can you use to replicate this growth on your website?
Let’s find out.
The Catalyst: How Process Street Reached 970K Monthly Visits
Process.st grew its organic traffic by performing the following:
- Creating new entry points to boost brand awareness
- Optimizing its content structure for People Also Ask results
- Targeting featured snippets
Let’s investigate these strategies to understand how they affected Process Street’s performance.
1. Creating New Entry Points to Boost Brand Awareness
In 2021 and 2022, Process Street averaged 3.6K pages on its website.
However, they amped up their content production in 2023.
Process Street added over 6K pages in just a few months.
The chart below shows how they increased the number of pages live on the site and the organic traffic that coincided with this growth.
| Month | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pages | 4,086 | 4,400 | 6,166 | 8,584 | 10,634 |
| Worldwide Traffic | 77,474 | 76,710 | 254,946 | 505,120 | 969,581 |
So, what did they add?
Tutorials and templates.
Tutorials became the main traffic drivers of the website, so we’ll focus on those first.
In the latter part of 2023, Process Street took a creative approach with its content strategy. Instead of creating tutorials for its own software, Process Street tapped into tutorials for other related SaaS tools.
We identified three main brands:
- Microsoft
- Workday
- Oracle
In these tutorials, Process Street addresses common questions related to the product.
For example, here are some of their best-performing articles:
- How to Log-In to a Workday Employee Account (see screenshot below)
- How to Remove Section Break in Microsoft Word
- How to Make the “N” in Spanish on Microsoft Word
These tutorials are straightforward and comprehensive. They often include a series of steps or actionable bullet point items.
In December 2023, these how-to tutorials generated 95.6% of all US traffic.
Templates were another endeavor for 2023.
Between September and December, Process Street added over 3.5K new templates to its website. These pages cover a variety of industries and needs.
Users can edit them using Process Street.
Templates generate minimal organic traffic but account for 24.8K ranking keywords in December 2023.
Why this matters:
Introducing third-party tutorials was pivotal in boosting Process Street's traffic.
It was also a clever way to introduce their brand to potential new customers.
By choosing software products related to their own, Process Street engages with an audience that may have a need for their product. These users are already familiar with cloud-based platforms commonly used in workplace settings.
The tutorial is an entry point for users to discover Process Street, thus boosting brand awareness.
Combined with templates, these new pages have contributed significantly to Process Streets’ ranking keywords.
The chart below demonstrates impressive growth, with them ranking for 261.1K keywords in December 2023.
How to find new ranking opportunities for your site:
You need to know what type of content people want before you can create new pages for your website.
Keyword research will help you find these ranking opportunities.
Keyword research is the process of identifying what words and phrases to target in your content. It tells you exactly what users are looking for in search engines and helps you tailor your content accordingly.
This guide shows you how to do keyword research using popular SEO tools.
Once you've collected a list of keywords, you can use them as the foundation for your content strategy. Topic clusters can help you with this process and keep you on track as you build out new pages.
As for boosting brand awareness, you can use creative ways to introduce your product or services to website visitors. Process Street uses banners and images with calls to action (CTA) to encourage users to try their product.
Tools for keyword research:
Did you know you can perform keyword research in WordPress?
All in One SEO (AIOSEO) connects to your Semrush account to make this possible.
After setting a focus keyphrase in the Keyphrase Suggestions tool, you can fetch relevant terms from Semrush. You’ll receive a list of keyword ideas, like the one below.
Once you add and optimize for a specific keyphrase, TruSEO will check your optimizations and let you know how your content performs.
Alternatively, you could add these terms to an ongoing keyword list and save them for future use.
Next, let’s look at how Process Street uses strategic subheadings in these tutorials to dominate search results.
2. Optimizing Its Content Structure for People Also Ask Results
Process Street uses smart optimizations in its content structure to stand out on the search engine results page (SERP).
One tactic is to organize tutorials using optimized subheadings.
Subheadings play an important role in the user experience. They guide readers through your article, dividing the information into digestible sections.
They're also important to search engines.
Like users, search engines use subheadings (among other things) to understand your page.
In Process Street's case, they use many question-based subheadings in their tutorials.
Here’s an example from their article on How to Log-In to a Workday Employee Account:
- What Is Workday?
- Why Do You Need a Workday Employee Account?
- How to Create a Workday Employee Account?
- How to Log In to Your Workday Employee Account?
- What to Do If You Forget Your Workday Password?
You can also see how these questions are supported by other subheadings, as shown below.
Note: The above screenshot was taken from the All in One SEO Analyzer. This free Chrome Extension makes it easy to analyze competitors’ websites or your own.
Why this matters:
By incorporating question-based subheadings, Process Street aligns its tutorials with common user queries. This positions its content to appear in Google's People Also Ask (PAA) box.
The PAA box is a SERP feature that aims to answer users' queries right on the SERP.
Here’s an example of one:
These search results provide various benefits, including:
- Higher clickthrough rates (CTR)
- More organic traffic
- Greater visibility
- Enhanced authority
For Process Street, they ranked 37K keywords in Google’s PAA box in December 2023.
How to optimize your content for PAA results:
This article shows you how to optimize for Google’s PAA box.
Here’s a quick overview of the process:
- For WordPress site owners, use an SEO plugin.
- Perform keyword research for question-based queries.
- Craft high-quality content that answers the user’s query.
- Implement FAQ or HowTo schema.
Process Street uses 3 out of 4 of the optimizations above.
We would like to see them implement HowTo or FAQ schema to see how many more PAA results they could get with this simple change. (We’ll show you how to do this next.)
Tools for winning PAA results:
You already learned how to perform keyword research in the previous how-to, so let’s focus on schema markup tools.
AIOSEO’s Schema Generator makes adding schema markup easy. Search engines can then use this schema markup to create enhanced search listings on the SERP, including PAA results.
To add FAQ or HowTo schema to a page, scroll down to the Schema Catalog when you’re in the WordPress editor. You’ll see various schema types and can click FAQ or HowTo, depending on your content.
AIOSEO will implement the schema markup on the backend of your website, and that’s it!
Next, let’s look at how these optimizations also helped Process Street win featured snippets.
3. Targeting Featured Snippets
PAA results aren’t the only type of rich result Process Street won in December.
They also saw a dramatic increase in featured snippets, ranking for 5.3K keywords.
Featured snippets are enhanced search listings that appear near the top of the SERP.
They appear after ads and sponsored posts (when present) and before organic results. They also feature more information than standard search results.
Below is an example, with Process Street’s result outlined in red.
Search engines generate featured snippets from the content on your website.
Here we see how the above featured snippet was pulled directly from the bullet points in Process Street’s Microsoft Word tutorial:
Why this matters:
Featured snippets boast an incredible 42.9% CTR. This is the highest CTR of all search results.
They’re also used to generate 40.7% of voice search answers.
Overall, featured snippets are one of the most valuable search listings you can get.
They boost your online visibility and drive significant traffic to your site.
How to optimize for featured snippets on your site:
While optimizations can't guarantee featured snippets, there are tactics to increase the likelihood.
The steps are similar to the ones discussed above when optimizing for rich results.
Here’s a recap of the steps discussed in this featured snippet optimization tutorial:
- Use an SEO plugin.
- Implement schema markup.
- Optimize content structure for featured snippets.
- Use a table of contents.
- Craft high-quality content.
- Scope out your competitors.
Tools for featured snippets:
At its core, winning a featured snippet is about creating the best piece of content that fulfills search intent.
AIOSEO’s TruSEO Analysis can help you understand your optimization efforts to maximize your content’s potential.
TruSEO gives you a score and checklist that make it easy to understand how your content stacks up against important SEO checks. You’ll also get recommendations for making any improvements.
Here’s an example of the Focus Keyphrase Checklist with a score of 90/100:
(TruSEO is a game-changing tool for winning PAA results, too. It streamlines all your content optimizations, maximizing the reach of every post or page you publish.)
Standout SEO Wins
Before we conclude, there’s an additional technique we’d like to highlight at Process Street.
1. They have an RSS feed.
RSS, short for a simple syndication or rich site summary, is a web feed. It allows users to curate a list of their favorite websites and see their latest content in one place.
RSS feeds also play an important role in proving content ownership. They tell search engines you’re the original author to prevent malicious attempts at content scraping.
RSS sitemaps also help your new content get crawled and indexed faster.
Tool: AIOSEO automatically generates RSS sitemaps for you. It can also help protect your content with RSS footers. These are added to the end of each RSS feed post, ensuring you get credit for your work.
Here is an example of how you can automatically set RSS tags to appear after your content:
Takeaways
In our analysis of Process Street, we were impressed with their use of on-page SEO and technical optimizations to create a robust online presence.
Their new content is undoubtedly responsible for 2023’s increased rankings and organic traffic.
Now, let’s review which strategies you can replicate on your website and others to tweak.
Top 3 Strategies to Emulate
- Add new landing pages to boost brand awareness. Process Street connected with its audience by tapping into queries on products they already use. While this approach won’t work for every business, it highlights the importance of thinking creatively when building a content strategy. Keyword research can inspire and support any ranking opportunities you consider.
- Leverage question-based subheadings to win PAA results. Organizing a clear content structure helps users and search engines understand your page. By using question-based subheadings, you align your content with common search queries. This makes it easier for search engines to identify your page as a source for a relevant answer.
- Target featured snippets with high-quality content and SEO. Featured snippets hold the key to standing out on the SERP and boast a 42.9% CTR. While there are no guaranteed strategies to win them, crafting helpful content is critical. You can support this content with SEO to increase the likelihood of winning these covetable search results.
Bottom 3 Strategies to Reconsider
- Crawlers flag some pages for reading difficulty. Content readability is an important metric that affects user engagement. It measures how easily users can read and understand your content. Some of Process Street’s pages are flagged as difficult or very difficult to read. TruSEO Analysis can help you catch readability issues and gives you actionable insights to fix them.
- Some page titles exceed character limits. Page titles, or meta titles, are the blue hyperlink text on the SERP. When your title exceeds character limits, it gets truncated. It’s best to keep these titles under 60 characters. You can use an SEO title tag generator to write them for you or check them using a SERP snippet tool.
- Not leveraging the power of social media. We would love to see Process Street leverage its social media accounts to extend its reach. While they do post occasionally, it’s infrequent. With all their new content, they could boost engagement by promoting their templates and tutorials. AIOSEO’s social media integration makes it easy to customize how your content looks on 11 different platforms.
Steal Our SEO Winning Strategy: A Checklist for Your Website
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Grow Your Visibility and Organic Traffic With AIOSEO
Want a direct route to replicating Process Street’s winning formula?
AIOSEO holds the key to unlocking your next level of growth.
All in One SEO is the best SEO WordPress plugin on the market. With thousands of 5-star reviews and over 3 million users, you’ll be in good company as you take on the SERP. With a comprehensive suite of tools and easy-to-follow recommendations, you’ll streamline optimizations for maximum results.
Here are some of our favorite features:
- Semrush Keyphrase Suggestions: Streamline your keyword research and find question-based keywords in no time. AIOSEO connects with your Semrush account to serve keyphrase suggestions in the WordPress editor.
- Rich Snippets Schema: AIOSEO offers various schema markup options to help you claim more rich results on the SERP. It’s as simple as choosing the schema you want; then, we’ll format the structured data for Google.
- TruSEO On-Page Analysis: Get an in-depth but easy-to-understand analysis of your optimization efforts. Each page includes an actionable checklist to help you maximize your content’s reach.
- RSS Content: RSS sitemaps are an invaluable tool for sites that produce a lot of content. AIOSEO automatically generates them for you, helping your content get crawled and indexed faster. We can also help you claim original authorship of content with RSS footers.
- AI Title & Description Generator: This game-changing tool uses AI to automatically craft unique, compelling, and click-worthy metadata for any page on your site.
- SERP Snippet: See how your metadata looks before publishing with the help of a SERP snippet preview. You’ll see if your content is the optimal length or needs tweaking.
- Social Media Integration: Seamlessly connect your social media platforms and share content with your audience. Available integrations include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, and more.
